


Holy Diver

by grayglube



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post season three, Tres Geckos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 05:23:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10892586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/grayglube
Summary: And, if she’s the first to realize it’s coming to an end, in some way or another, she doesn’t tell either of them.





	Holy Diver

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hasitsclaws](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hasitsclaws/gifts).



> Something I've been working on for awhile and needed to finish.

_the cathedral_

_is where you put your tongue_

_until you provoke God_

_to talk back_

_-from “PARENTHESIS” by Saddiq Dzukogi_

 

 

He keeps the late nights, she’s always been an early riser. They always seem to meet in the middle, in passing, like ships or souls.

 

He comes back from killing someone. Even if his mouth isn’t red she knows that blood is on him somewhere; a drop on his shirt cuff or viscera between his teeth.

 

It’s a quarter to six in the morning; he’s in shirt sleeves and she wears a rumpled sundress for the fourth day in a row.

 

The washing machine has gone the way of the dinosaurs and unlike Christ there is no hope of resurrection for it. She washes sweat out of one of their shirts in the kitchen sink while he stalks around the condo’s foyer.

 

His eyes are stuck on her, she can feel them on the knob of her spine, lingering between where her shoulders have pinched together. His body heat is nonexistent and he gets far too close much too easily. The ends of the shirt collar she’s rubbing together have made her knuckles raw and suddenly, slowly, he’s got one of her hips in the cradle of each big hand.

 

“What are you doing?” She asks.

 

“Showing you how to pat someone down the right way,” he says, his voice a sleepy slur and half-purr.  He prods her forward gently with his groin, hands moving and fingers stretching like cats’ claws catching on her hemline.The counter is sharp and hard against the edges of her pelvis.

 

He’s all trigger callouses and neat nails.

 

Her silence catches in her throat the same way words would, a hard gasp, quick and jerking.

 

His hands flatten and his exhale is so soft on her shoulders, gentle, that she might have leaned into it if he wasn’t casting a shadow over her.

 

He’s just finished eating someone.

 

“Richie.”

 

“Katie-Cakes.”

Her guts are full of rocks and her legs feel like cardboard tubes, she’s going to buckle under the weight of everything inside of her.

 

“Don’t call me that.”

He hums, sways, makes her sway too under how his hands move. There are knuckles sweeping up and around the hem of her dress to arc up against her lower back, hands turning and palms smoothing over where her skin is soft without any work, fingers dancing between her ribs, his tone going lower when he says, asks: “Because your daddy called you that?”

His palms aren’t warm but her bones are smoldering, skin as pink as sunburn. The back of his hands and his nails creep up the curve of her ass.

 

“Stop.”

He holds her sternum in one hand, can feel her heart beating on his life line, touches the pulse in her wrist, limp on sink.

 

He whispers, “It’s going to be okay.” The leather of his shoe is firm and cool against her ankle when he widens her stance. The glass of his watch face like ice on the skin edging the elastic of her underwear.

 

He’s got an erection and it’s heavy in the middle of her back, he’s always horny when he’s well fed. He stops counting heartbeats and lifts the back of her skirt. Her panties are simple stuff, washed out floral cotton that she’s had since before Mexico. “Just…,” she starts, unable to finish a sentence or a thought because he’s touching her.

There’s the blunt drag of a knuckle up the middle of her slit, gentle and his husk of, “I can tell when you’re wet, you know,” against her temple. Two fingertips circle her open above her underwear because confirmation has always made him bolder.

Shame is thick and viscous in the back of her throat, something else inside of her is like the sun. She’s wetter than she’s ever been in her life, maybe because it’s someone else touching her now.

“I told you to stop.”

 

He does, quick stepping away like he’s fleeing while she’s turning, hands clawing the counter and her sex throbbing like a torn out heart.

 

Her voice had been guttural and harsh and she’d spoken in the language of a place she should not still be dreaming of.

Her hands want to strangle him and from how easy it is to slip into a different self underneath the skin and polite conversation and the day-to-day of who she’s is, half prayer and half bandit, she guesses that there must be something like soul memory too. Her eyes aren’t red, but she wonders if they might have flashed for a moment. She wonders if she can make him afraid of _her_.

 

He doesn’t look afraid, just affronted like she’s the one to have done something impolite. She doesn’t notice the knife from the draining board she’s stuck into the meat of his thigh until he’s pulled it free with a grunt and dropped it onto the floor. She cleans up the blood left behind before Seth rises in the early hours of the afternoon, lying to him about why she’s mending a pair of his brother’s pants.

 

* * *

 

 

She takes baths when they aren’t around. Most of the time she’s good at guessing how long they will be gone.

 

The room steams and she’s underwater with her eyes closed, her nakedness something surreal.

 

Bubbles float from her nostrils.

 

He wonders what would happen if he held a hand against her chest and kept her from breaking the surface.

  

* * *

 

 

She opens her eyes and everything is bright white tile and light. Coming up for air feels like waking up.

 

The rooms smells like his cologne and she can see him in the mirror, standing in the hall.

 

She pretends he isn’t there.

 

* * *

 

 

Her bare legs stick on the vinyl when she slips into the booth beside him, eyes stay focused on the room just how his brother taught her.

 

“Order something for me,” she says with all the snooty expectance of a teenage girl who thinks nothing can hurt her.

 

He swallows a mouthful of what in his glass and glances at the knobs of her knees. Her thighs are tan from too much time in shorts with her feet propped up on the car dashboard. “What do you want?”

 

She shrugs and drags a finger through the circle his drink has left on the table top.

 

There are more than a few ways to answer his question; her drink order, her secrets, his own that she’s already swum around in.

 

“It doesn’t matter.” Nothing does anymore.

 

He orders her a whiskey sour and watches the way she moves the glass between her palms. “I’m sorry.”

 

He shrugs, careless or just trying to look that way. “They would have carded you anyway.”

 

“I ruined your plans.”

 

“What plans?”

 

She points at the very blonde thing with legs, the kind he always attracts; suicide blondes who only drink hard liquor. He looks, measures and weighs with his eyes, contemplating and without turning back to meet her glance asks, “Her?”

 

“She probably thinks you’re into jailbait now, though. Sorry.”

 

He takes another sip and turns his face towards her like a cobra rising.

 

“Maybe I just wanted to eat her.” His eyes drift over her collar bones and the ruffles curtaining across them.

 

“Isn’t it a waste to just eat them?”

 

His scoff and smirk are something sinister and even to him his chuckle sounds like a rattle.

 

“If they’re going to die because you need to feed, why not sleep with them first.” She asks.

 

“I’d be worse than a guy just trying to eat, then. Wouldn’t I? Is it the same afterlife sentence?" He leans closer to her. "Murder and whatever rape by deception goes down in Saint Peter's book as.”

 

“Might be a kindness,” she tells him sotto voce, “one last lay.”

 

He puts down his glass and straightens his tie. “You _are_ jailbait.”

 

“Have sex with me.”

 

He doesn’t pretend to be surprised, most of their time together has been leading to some version of this conversation, he might as well have seen it play out a thousand times before. “You have a bad habit of saying things like they’re commands, when really, they’re questions,” he says.

 

She shrugs and swallows half of her whiskey sour with a gulp that hurts her deep in the throat.

 

“Why?”

 

“ _Why’_ what?” She parrots.

 

“Why are you asking me to have sex with you?” He knows though.

 

“I want to. Seth would never say yes.” She lies because she hates the smugness that starts to seep from him whenever he thinks someone wants him.

 

His hand slips over her knee.

 

“Shouldn’t you ask some nice boy who can whisper psalms while he’s pumping?” His palm moves up, in, fingers flexing, one running up and down the stitch of her shorts.

 

She drops her eyes down to the table. “They wouldn’t understand.”

 

He sniffs at her hairline, under her ear, gently. Her pulse is steady, so regular he could set his watch by it. “That’s important, right? Anyone else would just think you’re some slut, but you’re not. You’re _so good_. You still highlight lines in the Bible and it matters that whoever fucks you knows you’re not like all those other people. Right?”

 

“Don’t make fun of me.”

 

“You want someone to appreciate it. But, I think you already got the virgin bonus when you died the first time.” He cups her mound with his whole palm, a warm seat for her to perch on and she pushes her sneakers harder against the floor to press into it. Her tone isn’t kind or nice when she answers him.

 

“The reason I don’t ask things as questions is because there’s never a straight answer with you.” She drags a nail down the back of his hand taking skin with it.

 

“What answer do you want, Kate?”

 

“‘Yes, I will’ or ‘No, I won’t’.”

 

He takes his hand away, the damage she's done already gone. His eyes lick into a different color like his knife opening. She doesn’t have anything else to say.

 

“Yeah, sure. I’ll be your first.” His smile has teeth and a bite.

 

He takes her continued silence as a crack in her moral bedrock, some lacking of nerve and he only slithers further in like an insinuation or the worst bad idea she’s ever going to have.

 

“Did you lose your nerve, already?” He sneers, top lip pulling up on one side to review one sharp canine. “Go back to the warehouse. I’ll just tell the one at the bar you’re my little sister or something.” He looks across the room, leering. His attention swaying, but it’s all for show. All the stage bravado shatters like a mirror when he snaps his head back to stare at her; “I’ll let you feed on me before.”

 

“Yeah?” He asks, like he’s daring her.

 

She leans back into the booth seat, “Yeah.”

 

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

 

He follows

 

And, in her bedroom, clean and sparse where his is order and patterns and Seth’s is cozy disarray, she sits on the edge of her bed and he stays standing.

 

It doesn’t look like he’s even breathing, her own chest feels too small for how big her lungs are, how hard her heart works from excitement and the giddy kind of lust that catches hard between all of her ribs.

 

She stands and reaches to undo the buttons of his suit jacket, he lets her. She’s expectant of his dangerous mouth and big hands but receives nothing. He stares down and she swallows, edging up on her toes to press her mouth to his so soft and quick it's almost chaste.

 

When she curls her fingers around his hands and sits again, trying to make him follow and cover her with his body he doesn’t move.

 

She frowns and his face stays blank. When she cants her head it feels like some kind of game, her smile sits on her lips for a while.

 

She stands again and tugs hard on his shirt cuffs.

 

His eyes jolt down, flick yellow and then resettle.

 

“You can kiss me,” she says, permitting, offering. But he doesn’t. It’s not quite that sort of game.

 

She frowns before she tries to find the words he wants to hear. “Please, kiss me.”

 

And, he does but the _please_ tastes sour inside her mouth. She wants to know what his tongue tastes like but his mouth is gone again and his eyes are open when she looks, rising up onto her toes and tipping forward, he back steps.

 

His hands don’t steady her, left to catch herself on his lapels she’s unsteady against his frame. He’s smirking softly, eyes wide open, staring down at her over his nose. She arches up to try again and fails, bottom lip catching his chin. He’s still grinning down and she can’t reach him. “Hey, come on. Stop being such a jerk.”

 

“I don’t know. I kind of like it. You’re pouting. It’s sort of hot.”

 

His eyes are yellow and his tongue traces his teeth behind his lips, tasting for the blood he’s sampled from her. She steps back to watch and wait, to try and learn the rules of whatever he’s decided they’re supposed to be playing until one of them wins.

 

“You’ve been sneaking around the bar for months, building up the courage to come and sit with me and ask me to fuck you, planning this out. Bad girl, Katie.”

 

“What? Like you don’t want to?”

 

He goes still, eyes only as snakish as he was before he got fangs, cold, murderous, he _was_ a murderer when they met. Her tepid smile falls off her face to somewhere around her feet where the floor has dropped out from under her when he shrugs.

 

“Got to be honest with you, I’m not feeling completely convinced it’s worth my time. What are you? All talk?”

 

It flips like a switch inside of her, the chilly reserve, like some pit that’s been dug out and never filled again when something terrible and ancient lived inside her body. He’s a kid with a magnifying glass and an ant hill, a burgeoning sociopath sitting in a circle of bug wings. She’s the things with extra legs to pull off and he’s the thing that’s so big and merciless that he might as well be the only god she knows.

 

“Don’t.” Her voice is wooden.

 

He’s smiling again. “Kate.”

 

“Stop it.”

 

And, his smile fades. They've been here before.

 

He catches her wrist as she moves past him to leave. She doesn’t pull against his grip, lets her arm turn limp and her voice go hollow.

 

“I’ve really tried to make up for things and no one else has ever cared enough to do the same. Just because you know some things now you don’t get to be smug about it, after everything you did.”

 

His grip has gone so tight it’s hostile. “What are you talking about?”

 

She doesn’t flinch but he does when she says: “If I’m going to be so lonely why am I still here with you two?”

 

He’s exasperated by her.“It isn’t like that.”

 

“I’m always just a kid being led around. Let’s be real, you don’t really want to fuck me anyway and I’m just going to be disappointed if you do.”

 

He lets go of her like she’s made of sunlight and fire.

 

She feels like something is tunneling inside of her chest, a blind worm chewing through her ribs.

 

He doesn’t say anything, she can see his mouth drop open but nothing comes out so she fills in around all the words he doesn’t seem to have. “I guess there’s something wrong with me, I don’t know why I asked you for this.”

 

She leaves and he’s stays right were he’s standing, by her bed and feels empty again. She shuts the door on him.

 

* * *

 

 

_… what I am aches in me._

_-Fernando Pessoa, from “I See Boats Moving,’_

 

It’s harder with the remembered taste of her blood sloshing around his lower brain, where there’s a veritable reptile’s room of his absolute worst, to ignore what she’s become.

 

She’s a third of their trio and her presence still chafes sometimes. Seth is loping at her side, arm slung around her thin shoulders as they move out into the warm afternoon. He and his brother are the most important people in her life now, he’s seen it and felt it the way she’s felt it because he’s tasted what runs through her heart. He watches from the window.

 

She gets in on the passenger side and gravel spits up from under the wheels as his brother starts the engine and takes her away for a while.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s looking at herself in the mirror, shoulders and elbows and ass pink from the water she’s stepped out from under, it’s still running but she’s staring at herself like it’s some irresistible urge.

 

He’s a creep but sometimes it’s like an irresistible urge of his own to watch her.

 

He knows when she comes out of her fog because her teeth grind and her glance slides sideways. “Do you mind?”

 

He gets the full picture with one long look, closes the door when he’s had his fill. He’s wondered how real the red hair was.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s no air conditioning inside the warehouse so she sweats in silence while the fan moves like an all-seeing eye vibrating on the wooden end table.

 

The coffee maker crackles, left on from when Seth left to do day surveillance, his brother sleeps, sprawled out in his big bed up the three-step rise. She’d sat on the counter and drank sour black coffee while staring at the angles of his bare legs and the slope of his naked shoulders, he’s got freckles across the top of them.

 

He doesn’t sweat so he doesn’t twist around the sheets in discomfort like she has. Her feet stick to the floor with each step closer to where he’s pretending to sleep and her knee pressing into the mattress makes the whole bed creak. His skin is cool under her hands and she curls around the line of his back, tucks her knees behind his. “It’s too hot.” She complains when he shifts, away from her instead of closer.

 

“If you’re going to sleep here then take off your shirt and roll over.”

 

She does, with excited but pitiful quickness she’s the closest she’s been to naked around him. He turns over to sling an arm across her hips, mumbling against the back of her head to tell her how nice her hair smells, rocking sleepily against her.

 

She pulls his hand up to cover her sternum and take some of her body heat. His fingers reach out to ghost across her nipples while she breathes, half-intentional but only because his hands are so much bigger and can always reach the parts of her that make her anxious.

 

A thighs slots between hers from behind, she rocks gently towards something too heavy to help her sleep, she dozes, comfortable and cooler while starting to get slick.

 

He’s tired and she’s still mad about how well he ignores her, it's as far as they get.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s gone again, she’s still in his bed with limbs pushed out in every direction sweating again. Seth changes channels from the couch a few steps below. His beer is empty so she brings him a new one once she’s dressed from the clothes left on the floor. She gives it to him over his shoulder. “Here.”

 

He cants his head just so. “You two just cuddle? That’s real cute.”

 

He’s not _really_ jealous, he’s smiling. A smile doesn't mean anything by itself, but he hasn’t tightened up like some dangerous animal so she knows he doesn’t mean it. “Like sleeping in a refrigerator.”

 

“I’ll take your word for it.”

 

She sits down beside him and glances at him askance. Sitting with him feels comfortable, the opposite of how less space between his brother and her makes her skin buzz like a bug zapper letting off blue electric light.

 

Seth is the safer brother now, the one that will let her hold his hand and close his eyes while she pretends to pray for them both. She hopes he understands that she needs him to keep pretending and to keep treating her like she’s just as human as she’s supposed to be.

 

She knows how jealous he _could_ get. Of her. Of his brother. He’s not quite sure himself who he’d rather be and she can pity him for that only because she knows exactly where she stands on the matter, she wants to be a predator again. Instead, she only just a girl.

 

She puts her head on his shoulder even though he's too warm.

 

* * *

 

 

In the car the night they’d left the bar she folded into the backseat and he’d had to make himself smaller to fit in next to her, half on top of her while she’d pulled her neckline down. Bare shoulder and unblemished collar, the sweep of clavicle painted in the neon splash of the bar signage outside of the car. He’d punctured her hard and couldn’t stop himself from sucking on the spot like he’d been trying to leave a hickey.

 

It’d been salty like sea water, at first, too much, then the smoke and cordite and metal of a bullet firing. Finally, underneath, there was something like petal sweetness, rose water, geraniums.

 

There’d been the taste of her mind and all her petty hating, all her awful wanting too. She’d stayed in the backseat while he drove back to warehouse looking at him in the rearview mirror, unsettling and accusatory.

 

* * *

 

 

He watches her reflection in the full length mirror that he bought for a woman that he’d loved once for a while.

 

He buys her clothes and she tries them on.

 

It feels paternal to take care of her. More than that, it feels like ownership. She turns her back to him and steps down from her heels, he likes her short, his brother likes her tall.

 

He unzips her pants and watches them drop and puddle, her naked ass pale and perfect, her tan-line’s stark. She keeps her blouse on, sleeveless and floral and aging her with its church-modest neckline. She climbs into his lap and presses herself against his slacks.

 

He goads.

 

“Genuine redhead, huh?”

 

She taunts.

 

“Put your money where your mouth is.”

 

“That’s not even a good pun.”

 

“Seth would have laughed at it.”

 

His fingertips reach out to stroke her thighs and flanks when she moves off of him. She puts on panties and takes off her awful blouse.

 

Catch and release has become their game.

 

* * *

 

 

Rangers come. The black hat kind, the metaphorical calling card of the bad _kind_.

 

They bring the amulet; unearthed and not exactly useless.

 

They point a gun at his brother’s temple and tell her to put it on, it feels like metaphor again.

 

Kidnappers, blindfold, they want to take her away and make her helpless enough not to have a say, so she does it.

 

And they’re going to splatter his brother’s brains everywhere like a Gallagher watermelon anyway and he’s standing in front of it all wishing she was more brutal, that she was cruel enough to call their bluff. She puts the amulet on and if she isn’t Kate anymore he isn’t sure who else it could be looking out of her eyes.

 

Slaughter might not be the best word to describe what she does to the bad guys who have come looking for a good way to get them all speedily back on track for the end of the world but it is messy.

 

 _She’s_ a mess when he reaches out to put his hand on her head while pulling off the amulet again. There’s blood in his mouth when she kisses him. Seth is still looking at the bodies, scowling. None of them can pretend she’s human anymore and she’s done a good job with the long con.

 

She’s had them fooled for the longest time.

 

* * *

 

 

“Will you come to bed with me?”

 

He wants to correct her words with something that better describes what she really wants from him but the harsher and filthier sentiments go dead in his mouth when she kisses him again.

 

The sweet, kind press of her lingers at the corner of his mouth. ‘ _God_ ,’ he thinks, because she means it, she _is_ it, and the softness of her is something real even if she not quite Kate Fuller anymore.

 

She undresses him and her hands might have done it every night since they left Texas or Mexico or Hell for how easily she manages.

 

She’s scoured the inside of his head before, knows what he’d thought about her when she was still jailbait, back before he was something other than a man.

 

Before he died, before she died, before they came back.

 

She knows him without having put the time in for true discovery. There’s something climbing inside his ribs that’s as welcome as anticipation and as encompassing as dread when she takes off her own clothes. She keeps still a half step in front of his open knees and lets him look at her before she comes closer and tips him back onto his elbows.

 

It’s familiar. He’s done the same thing to women. She’s been inside of his head. She’s pretending to be him, he’s the chick. He’s the one who’s about to get fucked.

 

He rolls her to her back, stretches his arms up and opens his mouth on her skin, down from her temple to her throat and the stretch of her sternum. He rolls his tongue over her breasts and shuts his mouth around the softness of them.

 

In his mind he’s seen Amaru touch her body like everything was unexpected and odd, the ignorance of an ancient thing that could not fathom the fragile human form, tender and so ready to be bruised, he doesn’t have the same trepidation.

 

Her feet stroke down the inside of his calves and her thighs are held open wide around his hips, she’s as body hot and slick as something cut open to die, he keeps himself pressed up on her navel. His cock looks bigger lying against her pale underbelly and his hand looks huge when he smooths it up between her breasts.

 

Her survival seems like a dream.

 

He wonders if she’ll survive him.

 

Something had been inside of her that should have split her open like falling fruit. Her hips pull forward like the twitch before sleep. Her tiny hands move over him, they don’t shake, his chest stutters up against her palms and his flanks shake when her finger tips trip down his sides, his spine lights up like an Independence Day sparkler while her nails moving over his scalp.

 

He’s taken himself in hand while she’s been exploring the planes of his flesh.

 

He’s opened her up the same way she inhales, careful and slow.

 

He looks down and she’s grinning, rocking her head into the pillows.

 

“Something funny?”

 

The peak of pink from her tongue just darting between her lips is half-innocent still until her teeth bite into her bottom lip, “Just the tip, right?” The laugh that leaves him is real enough.

 

He remembers Amaru inside of his head, everywhere at once, a voice and an echo, Kate underneath and her voice far away, now she’s looking up at him like she can read his mind.

 

There’s a question he wants to ask but stops himself from saying out loud.

 

She answers anyway, she looks sad about it.

 

“Sometimes I wanted to kill Seth. I wanted to know what was _inside_ of you.” Her feet press for purpose against his calves, hips pushing up, bones knocking into his. She wants him, badly, he can smell it, he wants to taste it.

 

He can see himself suck blood off his fingers, dragging bodies into locked rooms, systematically and with all the fine coordination of a man possessed carrying out all her wishes. Underneath her memories, he can feel her, too slick and too hot for a man like him, because he isn’t a man anymore, she clenches around the head of him like she’s glad he knows but hopes that he won’t mention any of it.

 

There’s something complicit in expression, her own defilement reads like a good trip or a vision trick by how heavy her eyes are and how softly she exhales against him. Amaru had gotten into his head and made him want to do things but there were still things he did on his own because _he_ wanted to.

 

All his earnest hope and blood-hunger had made him interesting. The thing inside of Kate Fuller then had wanted to make him tear down his entire world. The thing she’s become since then wants to fuck him and hurt him and ruin him with her own hands because he tore down her entire world.

 

She’s pushed up the mattress by his maneuvering, chest pressed tight to his, she’ll be bruised later if the sound she stutters out is anything to go by. Her lips hold tight, when she shuts her eyes she looks like a girl again, one who could quote psalms and proverbs, one who kept her cleavage concealed under three separate layers, one who felt bad about touching herself if she thought about real people instead of some faceless future husband.

 

In the long slow stops of trying to get all the way inside she lets his hands cover her ribs, her breasts. Her eyes open and she shakes underneath his stronger body, her eyes fall half-shut under his stare.

 

It’s lamentable that she’s never gotten to find her way through things slow, a piece of clothing at a time over weeks or months, some good Christian boy getting her more desperate and more willing each patient movie date or church social followed by the slow sloppiness of basement make-outs and dry humping on a decades old couch.

 

She’s never had to hide hickeys or explain away messed-up hair. Her daddy is too dead to worry about those things. Her mother was too selfish to warn her off bad men. Her brother left her in the company of monsters.

 

He pulls free to nudge the head of himself, swollen and hot along her slit until her eyes go wide, curious and he finds himself looking down on her confusion with something like regret.

 

“Wanna touch it?” Some part of him can’t help but want to push her buttons even now that she’s under him with her legs draped open. She doesn’t turn shy. She brushes over him with knuckles and then fingertips, pulls him closer with two fingers wrapped around his swollen cockhead like she’s in the mood to take him for a walk. He’d follow her anywhere. It’s a strange thing to be a part of, her enjoying his body like she’s alone with it, like he can’t see her through the dark. Softly nudging his way deeper like he’s promising her something, she only keeps breathing, staring up at him while the tension of her body refuses to give.

 

Virgins are a pain.

 

“You need to relax.”

 

He’s the only one with sweat pricking his hairline and navel, her skin hotter than anything he’s felt in a long time.

 

Her mouth opens on a whine, eyes closing and she stretches her body long, palms pressing into the headboard until it creaks and her ribs flare under his hands but, even then, her exhale finds him no deeper.

 

She tilts closer and something makes her eyes pull tight, a momentary twinge of trying too hard, she breathes again, huffing and rubbing her little tits against his chest, eagerness has made her sloppy, forgetful, radiant.

 

In the dark she sounds like she’s hurt, breathing too fast and too deeply, excitement lances through him too when he feels her body pulling, the give of her insides all around. The plaintive whine a thrillingly girlish thing that’s as alive as the rest of her.

 

It feels like he’s laid her out to steal the most vital parts because he’s owed them in sacrifice as her body opens slowly to take him.

 

Her soft rock up is easy and sweet but he’s stuck all the same when he tries to pull back, a laugh rumbling through him.

 

“You could skin a guy like this.” There’s a sweetness in how well he can feel her react to his low tone at her ear. Her inhale harsh, surprised. She’s clutching him like a greedy hand.

 

“Like quicksand,” he mutters at her temple, mouth damp, “I won’t be able to fuck you if I can’t get back out, Katie.”

 

Her voice is half a grumble against his neck. “Just let me feel it.”

 

His palms smooth down her thighs, they shake. Her heartbeat is frantic and her fingers knead at his back. It’s worrisome how poorly he can read her, he’s not supposed to need to ask questions to things he should be able to understand without words. “You’re shaking. Are you scared?”

 

She makes a sound of surprised denial, her breasts puffing up against his chest. “I’m not scared.” She sounds more annoyed than he could imagine of someone he’s buried inside of.

 

“You’re excited.”

 

She turns her head towards the pillow to press half of her face there, uncomfortable under his scrutiny. He can see the blood rushing through her vasculature, the hot stain of her blush through the dark. He grins. “I can feel your heartbeat in your cunt.”

 

Her lips press together to hold some sound inside her mouth, some bitten off half-moan of approval that she refuses to have pried out of her.

 

He puts his mouth over her breasts, tongue and teeth marking out the small curve of them and when he’s put both in his hands, she doesn’t let him move them away, holds her hands over his, shows him how to make her squirm against the sheets by rubbing his thumbs between her floating ribs.

 

When he moves, she holds her breath, and loses it like he’s punched her when he’s pushing back in. He tests her body shallowly and then presses up as deeply as they can get together, he commits the pattern that makes her hips chase his, thrusting up for something solid to drag herself against, greedy for an orgasm and a lasting memory.

 

Three shallow strokes and one long roll back as far as he can get, a nudge too deep and she keens, pushing up from the mattress with her feet to grind against his well-trained body, something comes undone like a stubborn knot between muscles, a bubble popping, a life ending.

 

Her fingers grasp and clutch and pull him closer, he forces his hips down hard, rolls against her and she cums with a few firm shoves.

 

It takes him longer for how tightly she’s wound him up in her limbs, for how she looks up at him, knowing every thought in his head, it’s stifling.

 

His orgasm burns his spine before it’s smothered, turned into glue.

 

He leaves a sticky mess inside her body and all across her thighs, laughing down at her shock, and young surprise. Her mouth has twisted, lips rubbing together, some blissed out expression of just how badly she’s wanted it taking over the landscape of her youthful shock.

 

Her arm sticks to his when they’re side by side.

 

She tells him, tireless: “I want to be on top.”

 

Her spine is a curved ladder and he rubs his thumb up it.

 

The front of her feet stroke the inside of his knees. She doesn’t like the word pussy until she hears him say it, again. Until he tells her how much he wants to put his mouth on it.

 

They do all the things he’s had time to think of and she makes him tired by the end of it.

 

In the dark she doesn’t move, she only stares at the ceiling.

 

The aura of her body heat warms half of him, he wants to stretch over her again and bask on top of her like a reptile on a rock in the sun. She’s staring at him when he turns his head to look.

 

She doesn’t look tired.

 

* * *

 

 

He finds out because they haven’t tried to hide any of the evidence.

 

The bed is rumpled and the room smells like sex. She’s got a purpling mark on her clavicle that doesn’t want to stay hidden under her collar. His brother’s glasses are lopsided from how they rolled over onto them when he’d pulled her on top, his usual neatness a few degrees off the mark.

 

It’s not a fight Seth wants to have in front of his brother and it’s only when Richie’s left to eat that he truly starts to scowl.

 

With thick lashes and a brow like a shirt from the night before he’s a vision of surliness. He crowds her space and she presses back, getting far closer than he’d ever get on his own. He still has some integrity but it only comes from his need to prove he’s more of an adult than she is, a little boy trying to look mighty. He sneers at how close she gets, if he breathes any deeper his chest would kiss her breasts.

 

She looks relaxed the way women do after they've been fucked well.

 

“You going to give me a taste now too? Let us both _share_?”

 

She takes off her bracelets and shows him her wrists, holds them up so he can see where they’re perfect and pale and have never been cut to the bone. “There’s something wrong with me.”

 

If she’s playing the innocent victim again then he can no longer tell.

 

He slaps her hands back down without any real force, he’s still scowling.

 

“There was nothing wrong with you until you climbed into bed with Richie.”

 

She steps back and slides the hem of her shirt up, not seductive, not careless, just to prove a point. It’s like she’s never been shot either.

 

“Don’t blame your brother, he wasn’t capable of ruining everything my life was when you two blew in, it was _you_.” She lets her shirt drop back, points at his chest. “There was nothing wrong with me until I had to make a choice. I thought you could protect me back then. I was wrong.”

 

He grabs her finger, holds it tight and smiles, it’s not a nice smile. “No one forced you this time, you decided to go and fuck him and now you want to pretend that it’s normal. Anything that’s wrong with you is your own fault now. I’m not going to let you fuck all of this up.”

 

“Maybe it’s Richie sharing you with me that would bother you the most,” she says, tone flat. It’s not the accusation he’s expected, the one he knows he deserves, the one that he knows would be true.

 

He pales and takes a step back so affronted that she wonders if she might have slapped him and not noticed doing it.

 

But, she hasn’t. He’s only being dramatic because he’s afraid. He’s _guilty_.

 

“It’s just me in my head. You just don’t like who I am now. Richie wasn’t the same when he came out of the woods, you weren’t the same when you got out of prison. If it scares you then I can try to act like the way I used to be.”

 

That’s what he really wants, things to go back to the way they were, before Amaru and before Santanico, before Mexico, before Texas, before he got pinched, before Richie broke, before she met them, before their entire lives went to shit.

 

He’s always wanted more and better and he’s still stuck, growing out of the poison soil put down by a shitty father, an absent mother, a MacDonald triad brother and the circumstances of his own criminal lifestyle.

 

“It’s not my fault you feel useless now,” she tells him.

 

* * *

 

 

Richie needs to feed and it’s only after the bitter silence of his brother’s presence in the confined space of the car edges on twenty minutes that she gets out and starts to walk.

 

She’s finds Richie quickly, watches him kill with all the detachment of watching someone tie their shoes before they leave the house.

 

“How long could you keep him waiting before he would drive away?” She asks.

 

“Me?” He asks back, grinning like a fault-line. “He’d wait for-fucking-ever, _for me_. Katie-Cakes.”

 

They go back to the car.

 

Today, they don't push their luck.

 

* * *

 

 

“Do you want to fuck her, or not?”

 

“Fuck off.”

 

“You could ask.”

 

“You need to get out of this room, Richard.”

 

“You gonna shoot me while the neighbors are home to hear? Really? Mature.”

 

“What _is_ wrong with the two of you?”

 

“That’s a dumb question. Answer mine first.”

 

“She’s not right, you know it, she knows it. This thing isn’t going to end well.”

 

“We both died and went someplace that should have been the worst place but it wasn’t so bad. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with us.”

 

* * *

 

 

_You had the nerve for violent death, unholy death._

_-Anne Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides_

 

“You ready?” His brother asks.

 

“Yeah.” She nods, smiling, brilliant, perfect, a girl she used to be, a girl they might as well have killed themselves.

 

“Let’s just go. Get this over with.” He says, slamming the car door.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s an easy job.

 

So is the next one and the one after that.

 

They’re _all_ easy, until the one that isn’t.

 

Until the one that kills him.

 

* * *

 

 

He wakes up.

 

He blinks back into existence and ponders the benign indifference of whatever black afterlife he’s come out of, less like sleep and more like driving a car at four in the morning without any sleep.

 

Death had been bleary and heavy, like television fuzz.

 

The chair next to the bed creaks and he expects to find one of them in it.

 

He blinks.

 

It’s only the house settling itself and the wood stretching in the warm sun of another spring day.

 

He’s not sure what day it is but he knows it’s spring by the smell, by his own revival.

 

The more he thinks the more he wonders if it might be summer instead, some domestic July afternoon where the nights still smell like fireworks and cicadas buzz like telephone poles in the heat.

 

With his eyes open, seeing, he knows he’s not anywhere he’s seen before. It’s the doubts that lead him somewhere out of the bed he wakes in. He doesn't know if he's really alive after all.

 

She’s waiting for him downstairs in a different house’s kitchen. She tells him he’s in Hell but that the kitchen is from her old house in Bethel.

 

He asks if she’s real, if she’s dead too.

 

“We’re leaving. So yeah, I guess I’m real.”

 

“Where’s Richie?”

 

“Out there.” She thumbs in some vague direction that’s meaningless in his afterlife.

 

“Why didn’t he come?”

 

“Can’t. Just me.”

 

“Is it because of her?”

 

“Amaru?”

 

He nods.

 

She shrugs.

 

They walk out of Hell together and things seem balanced. Things seem fair again. He holds her hand on the long way out. His brother is waiting, looking as worse for wear as he’s seen him in years.

 

* * *

 

 

They’re driving around with the convertible top down, fate not choice dictating the state of artificial shade, the fuse burned out and there’s no fixing it for a few days yet.

 

His brother has been in the trunk for sixty-eight miles and counting and it’s then that he leans over towards the passenger seat and drags her face close by the chin.

 

Being in the sun feels good, the wind feels good, being alive again is good. Something in him feels like it’s grown, his skin a size too small to hold who he’s becoming.

 

Kate coos, softly, pulling back.

 

He lets the wheels roll slowly over the gravel of the shoulder, coming to a stop.

 

There’s no one on the highway. The world is sand colored where the black ribbon of the road doesn’t cover. He imagines Richie staring at the glow-in-the-dark watch hands, discovering that it’s only two-sixteen in the afternoon.

 

He forgets about his brother and thinks only of the girl in his passenger seat. They stop for long enough to climb into the back seat, open his slacks, push up her dress, and let nature start to take its overdue course. He steadies her pace and she won’t stop kissing him.

 

“I’d lost hope of you screwing your balls back on little brother,” comes out muffled through the seat backing, he’d answer his brother but he’s pulling on a nipple with his teeth and being held by the hair by the girl he’s got squirming in his lap. She yanks hard when he bites.

 

“That hurts, you know.” She tells him.

 

He rubs his scalp. “You better behave or I’ll put you in the trunk when I’m done. Don’t think Richie will be too nice to you after this.”

 

“Maybe he’ll just fuck me some more.” She's raspy voiced, teaching him a thing or two she's already learned from his brother with her insistent hips and strong young thighs.

 

“Is that good, then? That what you want? You want Richie to fuck you next?”

 

“Unless you want him to do you first.” She husks sharply.

 

A hand comes through at the seam of the seat like Carrie after prom burned the whole school down.

 

“I’ll skull fuck both of you if you don’t shut up,” He says from the trunk.

 

* * *

 

 

“You’re warm.” Richie tells him.

 

He bites off _‘get off,’_ and his brother chuckles.

 

“I’m cold. I need to feed.” But, Richie goes, leaves the couch to pace the floor behind their favorite girl.

 

From her spot across the living room she keeps reading her book. “Should we go out and play ‘cherry pie’?”

 

“You up for that tonight?”

 

In his brother’s favorite chair with her legs drawn up over the arm and the bare spread of her navel perfectly smooth and pale from a long east coast winter, she shifts to shrug. “I’d have to get dressed.”

 

She’s the perfect pervert bait.

 

“Because half your ass hanging out is a quarter too much?” He sneers at her. “Don’t you get sick of eating perverts?” He asks his brother.

 

“Coming from the guy who falls into a honey-trap half as often as he takes a job.” She mutters, eyes rising like he might chastise her only after she’s said her piece.

 

“Yeah, Seth,” Richie shakes his head in theatrical effect, “ _you’d_ be easy.”

 

Kate keeps pretending to read her book and Richie flips a page to keep scanning over her shoulder.

 

“You lonely over there little girl?” Seth asks.

 

She lowers her book so he can see her eyes. He raises his brows. Then, she’s standing and pushing her bed shorts towards her ankles like some kind of challenge standing in the middle of their living room.

 

Richard looks hungry behind her, reaching and grabbing and dragging her closer as he sits in the abandoned chair. He puts her in a straddle over one big thigh and pushes her hair forward off of her shoulder with some kind a half-interest to get to her jugular.

 

He bounces her and she’s squirms back and forth like some kind of pornographic puppet show. “After,” she hisses out. Richie’s already dropped fang, starting to sniff at her hot nape rubbing her with two big fingers in lazy figure eights.

 

“Before.” His brother demands.

 

She whines. “I hate when you do it before.”

 

It’s not the struggle for casual intimacy that kills him, it’s how they talk to each other like they make some deal every time they sneak off somewhere, Richie gets to eat and Kate gets to cum and Seth can’t stomach the wrong of it.

 

Like junkie and dealer, one hand stroking the other, mouths feedings mouths and Richie tonguing over the puncture wounds, cooing against her skin, preening there like some mammoth bird of prey; to her he says: “Later, I’m going to make you cum so hard.” And to him he says: “Get her a juicebox.”

 

Seth says: “Fuck you.”

 

“After care is important. She faints.”

 

“You took more this time,” she accuses, shivers, “I’m cold.”

 

She’s still nude where is matters most and the pale crest of each hip looks vulnerable in a way that makes Seth hate himself for staring at.

 

“Seth will cuddle with you.”

 

His brother still wears his snake face and she slips off his knee to puddle on the floor, knees shut together again, slumped in some crumpled alphabet letter shape.

 

He doesn’t cuddle with her but he does heft her up to bring her to bed.

 

“Richie’s an asshole.” She mumbles into the flesh of his neck.

 

His brother only chuckles and licks a smear of red off his thumb which tastes like her in other ways.

 

* * *

 

 

It’s fun sometimes. The three of them together.

 

She still prays for them even if she thinks he doesn’t know.

 

Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel jealous.

 

Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel left behind.

 

* * *

 

 

_A god has no soul to send to the Underworld. At death, a god is merely absent._

_Fates’ decide to cut cords._

_-At Death the Gods Ask Only For Forgiveness **Challenge 01** L.H.Z_

 

 

She’s a woman and a little girl and some dead thing all at once and it makes things easier more often than it makes them difficult.

 

Everything is at odds and spite comes natural, the greediness and the sometimes shame when she’s alone because she’s left one of them sleeping are easy to push away.

 

It’s the feeling like she’s getting back to normal and the girl she used to be that fits all wrong.

 

She’s got his cock in her mouth and he’s so _close,_ his knees pull up around her head like a woman's would.

 

Going back twelve hours she’d asked if he trusted her.

 

She’d told him to prove it.

 

‘ _Anything_ ,’ he’d said.

 

She’d wanted him to open his mouth and she wanted to put the gun his brother bought for her in it.

 

He’s afraid of her.

 

He told her so and told her, shaking his head, _“that doesn’t mean I don’t trust you.”_

 

Her teeth graze the underside of where he’s throbbing for her and it’s then that he knows she knows he’s a liar.

 

He flinches and she lets him come in her mouth. He doesn’t see if she swallows but the memory of her teeth on his skin makes him shiver.

 

She whispers his name. Like’s the way that tastes too.

 

 _Seth_.

 

* * *

 

 

He doesn’t see it, not right away. That, he thinks is what bothers him the most, that _he_ was the second to see, the last in their trio.

 

The truth is she never saw either.

 

Seth is more observant of things now that he’s caught up with them, death for death if they happen to be keeping score. Seth’s the one that had said once that she wasn’t right, that nothing about her was right, once, twice, always.

 

Somewhere in the gutted remains of what used to be Jackknife Jed’s, in the very ancient belly of the modern-day hub of worship where A1 steak sauce sliders and Jack Daniel’s twofers are the preferred offerings, she is weeping.

 

She doesn’t want either of them around, doesn’t want to be touched, doesn’t want to eat, doesn’t want the sun or the sleep that might help heal her, she simply wants to wait out whatever it is she finds herself a part of.

 

A part of her came back from the dead as something less than, _more than_ the sibilant hiss supplies from somewhere cerebellum deep.

 

The part of her that’s been fucking him for a full calendar year is lost in the fugue of her angry post-adolescent pain, the part of her that’s been fucking his brother for a few months isn’t completely at fault, they’re the ones that fucked her up in the first place.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s blood that’s ruined his shirt cuffs, seeped in like an ink pad to color the knobby turns of his wrists and drip down like he’s been playing with finger paints.

 

It smokes and sears like steak drippings.

 

He’s warm before he’s hot, before his hands are bright and burned black like barbeque briquettes.

 

She’s looking at him like _he’s_ the monster even when his brother’s behind her with heartstring between his teeth.

 

* * *

 

 

She let them fuck her. They let her fuck them. In the dim recall of so many nights spread out and shaking from more than just the weight of another body or the restless hands and impatient mouths there’s an itchiness in her bones that wants to rejoin the world again.

 

It isn't something wholly un-her, it isn't something fully realized either.

 

Amaru has been gone for almost as long as she had been inside, but there’s still something. Something black and gaping and starving.

 

Maybe it’s her.

 

Maybe her goodness is gone, maybe she left it on the side of the road, next to some dead drifter, in her jewelry box with her mother’s gold cross or on an altar in the moldering foundation of an ancient temple.

 

She opens a Bible for the first time in forever and reads.

 

It’s different than she remembers.

 

* * *

 

 

He’s mercifully alone.

 

He’s not on fire anymore but his hands still hurt. He remembers Brasa and how he’d mused about taking his body as a new form.

 

He wonders if all the dead will bring something back with them when rapture happens, he’ll ask Kate when he heads back in from the bars and the noise and the women who keep looking at him like they want to devour him alive.

 

They look at him like they want him to hurt them.

 

There’s a body next to him in the morning. The acrid stench of burnt hair is nauseating. He needs to leave, and so, he does.

 

The fucked-up parts of him come fully into focus when he's driving away from the burning motel.

 

He doesn’t feel bad.

 

He doesn’t feel anything.

 

* * *

 

 

The hunger is controllable but the dreams of prophecy are hectic and hellish, pooling at the bottom of his mind, and then whipped up and splattered like the rain.

 

It’s an ache, noiseless and orchestral in turns with each moment.

 

He never asked to be a fucking prophet.

 

There’s a woman who was a girl once in some hot balmy place with cruel, careless gods who have the appetites of lesser men, who tells him it was always going to end in the way that’s still coming and there’s girl who’s never had a chance to be someone’s woman, who hums the parsed up fragments of old songs and tells him things will be fine because he’s already been to Hell and it wasn’t so bad.

 

Maybe that’s because she’d been there too and incongruous of her God’s benevolent and merciful nature it _hadn't_ been so bad. So, maybe that’s why he’s never believed and maybe that's why she’s trying so hard to fake it in order to find it again.

 

* * *

 

 

They lie together like little boys, like children.

 

One of them rolls over, it doesn’t matter who, it’s one or the other, curling close, too close, lazy frottage evolving into something far less sleepy and far worse than their usual state. One might burn like the sun and the other carve in between ribs like a knife but they both know how to bloody the other.

 

It’s not hard to cum looking up at or behind or straight ahead at a face he’s seen almost every day of his entire life.

 

Once, one of them read that the longest relationship one has is with their siblings and on a Venn Diagram of their lives the largest point is where they intersect and it’s only with the other than anyone remembers either of their names.

 

His brother’s mouth is hot, like blood, like the sun.

 

* * *

 

 

There’s only one person left alive who remembers the way they used to be, who knows what they are now, who recognizes and disregards what difference there is between the past and the current events that have become undisputed fact.

 

And, if she’s the first to realize it’s coming to an end, in some way or another, she doesn’t tell either of them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I promise I have not forgotten about Kin, Kansas City Shuffle, or Kill Me If I Retreat. Working on next chapter of KCS with hasitsclaws and a two-shot collab, AND a seperate wonderful and filthy collab with delirante.


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